I would not even be thinking of installing this, if it weren't for that disclosure at the end that Doctorow is on the advisory board. Either this site is on the up-and-up, or someone hacked him.

But, far be it for me to accept argument from authority, so I'll have to look at the TOS myself in detail, or at least the source code.

Or not. TOS's are long. Source code is longer. I should just trust Cory.

Did you just say it was safer than it looks because there are invisible support structures shooting out above and below it?

I've banged my shins on too many glass coffee tables to be anywhere near OK with that.

Does anyone else remember a car commercial which described a long cause-and-effect chain that started with a butterfly flapping its wings? It seems the butterfly is to Lorenz what the apple was to Newton.

Also, in before link to xkcd's "Real Programmers".

It's Rickrollympics! How far can we push this before it gets old? Forever, I say. I like the BalkiRoll myself (look it up). The rickmob was nice but the synchronization problems were apparent even in the crappy phonecam videos.

Believe it or not, there are people who don't know about Rickroll yet. I have a musician friend who was doing a show last week, and someone in the audience yelled "Rickroll" as if instead of "Free Bird". He was confused. I chose to explain it to him by way of an LJ post the next day, though I'm quite the poor prankster so I can't be sure he clicked the link. My ruse was that someone unbeknownst to him phonecammed his show.

The only thing that can kill it is if Tom Cruise re-enacts the video.

Here's the radio episode where Penn told this story.

http://www.pennfans.net/view/Audio_Archive/PennRadio/The.Penn.Jillette.Radio.Show.2006.04.11/

It's followed by another great story about a party he threw that almost ended in disaster because he invited both a chimp and a dwarf. He actually had to finish the story the next day. Click "Prev" to get to April 12, because the episodes are indexed backwards.

This was an important landmark for the show, because a week later there was another primate-related story, which in turn sparked the months-long tradition known as "Monkey Tuesday", leading to many brilliant stories by callers, many of which were completely ruined by delay dumps. For example, they bleeped out the word "nipple" in the "A Monkey Bit Off My Nipple" story.

Oh, I almost forgot the one thing that made the Atari 8-bit machines better than other 8-bit branded computers of the day: the happy noises it makes when you boot it up by disk.

Listen to the end credits of the first episode of The BBS Documentary; you'll hear it. It makes a happy beeping sound while it loads DOS into memory, and then a silly raspberry sound while it checks the serial bus for a printer, and then more happy beeping sounds while it checks for an AUTORUN.SYS file, or loads the RAMDisk driver, or whatever else.

The serial bus had an audio channel, and the POKEY sound chip also drove I/O, so a lot of devices made sounds through the TV speaker, including cassettes. Some just had this awful grinding sound for each block of data, but some programs would load just a few sectors of that, then mute it, so that you could hear the audio track recorded on the other stereo channel. This made loading cassette games much more bearable; even if the tape wasn't set up with loading music, you could still at least count the sectors down.

This made it to Digg, btw.

http://digg.com/gadgets/Fantastic_Picture_Atari_user_s_desk_circa_1983

This picture is also special because it depicts just about every piece of computer equipment you could buy from Atari before the Tramiels took over and created the "XL" line. Everything was the same shade of tan as the Commodore 64, so it's a shame the picture isn't in color.

I personally grew up with an Atari 400, which my parents picked over a Vic-20. That was the right choice, even though the Vic-20 was a better brand and had a real keyboard, and bigger text for visually impaired me. The Atari 400, at the same price, had a better game selection, more RAM, and excellent forward compatibility. It was nice to be able to keep all my software once we upgraded to the Atari 800XL (64K), and then again to the Atari 130XE (128K).

Did anyone else write game names on masking tape so that they could keep all their cartridges in a stack without being faced with 20 identical "LEFT CARTRIDGE" captions on top?

People are forgetting that the plane landed safely with all its passengers. People are only frightened because of the prospect that it could have been worse.

Or, people are only frightened because all the local news channels are interviewing everyone they can find, whether they have any expertise in the matter or not, and airing the ones who are most alarmed, above a caption that says "AIRLINE PASSENGER".

Xopher, you may have saved the life of my future self.

P.S. I understand that TG's probably get questions way more than albinos do, hence the "attitude" getting turned up. I probably didn't make the point clearly enough that outsiders, even those who attempt to consider the "FAQ problem", can't fathom its magnitude. Not even me, and not even after having being asked repeatedly about my pubic hair.

Well, I admit that most of those questions are rude. I suppose if you were answering them for the first time, the right thing to do would be to be more polite, and explain to whoever was asking that the question does make you uncomfortable and try to move the conversation elsewhere, especially away from that person.

I have albinism, which is another highly visible but uncommon human trait, and get asked about it maybe two or three times a year. I dno't mind answering questions most of the time; the most uncomfortable part of it is that I often have to explain the handicap that comes with it, which is less visible. Some people, on the other hand, are so hugely bothered by it that they've printed up "encounter cards" that they hand to people as a way of saying "read the FAQ".

These cards never contain the word "dumbass".

I know one TG through a friend on a social networking website (never met). He's FTM and gets laid more often than me. And I knew him before he came out as TG, and was just passing as lesbian. When he did come out, he got a new profile for that identity. He pointed out that, after the math worked out, he was just a straight guy, so I took his word for it. And if I ever talk to him about TG issues, which is super-rare, I make it very clear that I'm talking about my own perspective as a non-TG straight guy trying to make sense of the world. I think the one question I asked him is whether he was generitcally XX or XY. The answer: XX. And it's these kinds of questions, and answers, that make it possible for someone like me to challenge my motion of what defines a gender.

But here's why I'm really contributing to this thread: I can name three men who wrote video games in the 1980's and then became women, in that order. I'm sure it's just a coincidence, but it does seem kind of too much to be a coincidence. It's not like I can name three albinos classic video game programmers, or three transgender physicists.

I watched Jamie Fenton, the creator of Gorf, speak at Classic Gaming Expo '98. She and her voice were both six feet tall, so I had to make the conscious choice not to jump to conclusions. But then she showed some old film footage of her old self demonstrating Gorf 2, and the cat was out of the bag. She jokingly referred to him as "her brother", and I think the audience laughed and was then free to concentrate on the gameplay footage. In the time since, I learned that the landmark Atari 800 game MULE was written by Dan Bunten, who then became Dani Bunten, and Will Wright dedicated The Sims to her memory. And when I looked up Shamus, one of my mother's favorite games, I found out that the author, William Mataga, became Cathryn Mataga, and she and Fenton have both continued to work in the video game and related industries.

So, where in the happiness plan does it fit in to read pages and pages of educated, authoritative commentary on why the economy of the country I love has been gutted by the plutocrats, and soon none but the richest billionaires will have so much as a pot to piss in, and there's nothing we the people can do to stop it?

Just wondering, because as a code monkey who's got nothing but a 401(k) in USD to show for his life, and moderate programming skills, it's very likely that when the depression comes, I'll be the palest jar of jerky in my survivalist friend's cabin in the woods.